The evidence that it existed is there, preserved in thin dark bands of charcoal pressed into the soil, the ghostly outlines of walls reduced to ash, but no coherent plan has ever been recovered. It is, in a strange sense, a building that archaeology can confirm but not describe.

The site sits within a large and complex cluster of monuments on Slievereagh, known in Irish as Sliabh Riabhach, on what antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp identified in the early twentieth century as the supposed site of Temaír Erann, the ancient burial ground of the Ernai tribe. The house remains, designated Site e, lie in the southern quadrant of a rectangular enclosure, a defined area bounded on three sides by a bank and fosse (a fosse being a defensive ditch) and on the fourth by a group of conjoined ring-forts, the circular earthwork enclosures typical of early medieval Ireland. When Seán P. Ó Ríordáin excavated here in 1940, he stripped several sizeable areas and made additional trial cuttings across the interior, acknowledging that the full extent of such a large enclosure was beyond practical investigation. On the western side of the feature recorded as Fort 6, his team cleared a considerable area specifically in the hope of uncovering house plans. The charcoal was there. The houses had clearly burned, or had walls built partly from organic material that eventually carbonised. But, as Ó Ríordáin wrote plainly, no definite house-plan could be recovered.

The site lies in rough pasture and is part of a much wider archaeological complex at Cush, which rewards patient visitors willing to read a landscape rather than inspect a monument. The enclosure and its associated ring-forts are the more legible features to look for on the ground. The house itself, or rather the place where a house once stood, is best approached with Ó Ríordáin's 1940 excavation report in mind, since what is visible above ground gives little away. The charcoal bands that once marked the walls are long since re-buried.